When electronic books are delivered to consumer devices such as tablet computers and electronic readers (“e-readers”), a tag embedded in the book's electronic data may be used to designate a Start-of-Reading Location (“SRL”). The first time an electronic book (e-book) or similar document is opened on a device, the device can be configured to “open” the book to a location that is designated by an SRL metadata tag embedded in the e-book's data, allowing a device user to begin reading content immediately without having to flip past the title page, publisher information page, table-of-contents, forward, acknowledgements, etc. Among other things, this allows a user that has downloaded a book via a network connection to begin reading relevant content promptly after downloading, such as within seconds of having purchased the book.
Where to place an SRL “stamp” in a book is a labor-intensive process. The SRL “stamp” is the location in the e-book designated in the metadata (e.g., by a markup-language tag). While an SRL stamp might be included by a publisher, editor, or author, adding the stamp often requires having a person review the first several pages of the book in order to decide where to place the stamp. Solutions based on having a computer search by keyword or detect formatting transition to determine where to place the SRL stamp typically produce inferior results to manual review, since the diversity in writing styles and introductory content in books makes one-solution-fits-all automation solution impractical.